Thousands of peaceful protesters have descended on New York City’s financial district today to send a loud message to President Barack Obama: “End the influence money has over our representatives in Washington”.

The protesters intend to create a ‘city of tents’ and remain there for as long as it takes for their “one demand” to be met.

Unfortunately, free and fair elections are a thing of the past in America. Because of recent Supreme Court decisions, money is flowing freely and unaccountably into the American electoral process. Elections will be swayed by interests opposed to those of the United States. Corporations, even those owned by foreign shareholders, will and do use money to act as the voices of millions, while individual citizens, the legitimate voters, are silenced and demoralized by the farce of American Democracy.

The President and the First Lady, ironically enough, will be in New York City this Monday (Sept 19-20) schmoozing those same moneyed-interests at a private $38,500 per person Park Avenue fundraising event. The protesters hope to extend an invitation to the President to come downtown and to “join our people’s assembly”.

At the OccupyWallStreet website, the organizers describe the protesters as every American, apart from the corrupted establishment:

Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.

There are solidarity protests also being held in other parts of the world, including Milan, Madrid, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Santander, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and now Algeria and Israel.